As a small and growing organization, I try to make sure that we are focused on helping others and sharing information. ServiceSphere has given more information away in the past 15 months of being in business to anyone, friend or foe than any other organization I have seen.

Why have we done this?

It’s the right thing to do.

No one is going to pay for “best practice” in a world of google.

The love you get is equal to the love you give.

In the past, we have also been very vocal about a company called “BrightTALK” and last year that lead to a tweet from someone named “David” at BrightTalk.

At that time I rallied around the idea of having to register to view old content was absurd. David wanted me to answer the question “How do you track sign up’s”. At that time I told David I would blog on this topic, because I could not possibly answer him in 140 chars.

Let’s start at the beginning. If your organization is in the business of getting leads via “email” then registration is important. I have worked for many ITIL and ITSM vendors that LIVED for email leads. I understand why it is important, but in the year 2010 and if your sales and marketing strategy is based on emails and tradeshows only, you better have a good exit plan.

Today’s consumers or prosumers are savvy, they use gorilla mail (or should) to sign up for events. They go to eventbrite to search for information

Today in business you need:

A killer product

A killer influence

A sea of zombies who only live to complete you (Think APPLE)

Email registrations are needed for one thing and one thing alone, SIGN UP. After someone is signed up they should not have to ever “Login” to see content again. ServiceSphere webinars collect email addresses so that we can remind people of the event and send them a LINK to the video from the event afterward.

Post event, asking someone to register, is a visible sign of a weak company. The event is over, the information is out on the net somewhere, so you really expect that someone is going to “pay” with their identification to see something that was unoriginal, uninspired and now reused?

itSMF UK today released a webinar on VIDEO for ANYONE to watch see it here

So what does this mean? It means exactly what you think it means, we as a ITIL / ITSM community realize the value to each other comes from what we give away and not what we charge for, and yes asking me for my personal contact information is a charge.

In today’s hyper news stream my personal information is more valuable than your content. Organizations will continue this practice of spamming consumers of content until those organizations are blacklisted off the face of the earth. So instead, offer take your “free and complementary” webinar and actually give me the chance to pay you 5.00 via paypal INSTEAD of giving you my personal information. It’s a win / win and YES people would rather pay 5.00 (look up the micropayment economy on google) than give you their email address.